Second, that 5 million–actually, as Apple put it, “more than 5 million”–doesn’t count people who preordered but haven’t yet received their iPhone 5s. It’s unclear how many that would be, but one analyst estimates it could be 1 million or more, even assuming Apple was correct when it previously said most customers who preordered would get their iPhone 5 last Friday.

Third, while Apple no doubt would like to sell as many iPhone 5s as possible, it so routinely runs short of demand on new products that you have to wonder if that’s part of its marketing plan. Scarcity, at least for a product generally well-reviewed and certainly highly anticipated, suggests to potential buyers on the fence that this is the device they’ve got to have. It’s hard to imagine that Apple, of all companies, doesn’t have the means to fulfill that pent-up demand over the coming weeks and months. …

Even though I recommended that most people not buy Apple’s just-launched iPhone 5 last week, I’m the last one to be surprised that my sage advice was largely ignored. Apple just announced that 2 million people pre-ordered its latest and greatest smartphone in the first 24 hours. I fully expected the new iPhone to be enormously popular because, well, Apple’s major products almost always are.

I still stand by my advice, however, despite the record pre-orders. I continue to think that most people who own a smartphone purchases in the last year or two have no overriding reason to buy a new one so soon, and some good reasons not to. Nonetheless, it’s worth asking why so many people did anyway–and why a third of Americans want one:

2) The iPhone 5 is the right decision for a certain portion of smartphone buyers–easily millions in a market of hundreds of millions of them. As I wrote before, if you have a phone that’s more than a couple of years old, technology advances mean it’s about time to get a new one, and the iPhone 5 is a great choice, if not the only good one.

3) The new iPhone is a clear advance over the iPhone 4S, even if it’s not a revolutionary advance. It has high-speed 4G data capability, its screen is larger, and it’s noticeably lighter. All good.

4) Media hype. The dirty little secret of tech media is that anything written on Apple gets a lot of readership, even if it’s not positive–though it was hard to be too awfully negative on the iPhone 5. Sure, the Samsung Galaxy S III and other smartphones have more bells and whistles, but not enough more to really shame the iPhone 5, and the S III has its own shortcomings as well. And so that mostly positive iPhone coverage drove more interest in the new Apple phone, and record pre-orders. Nothing new here, but this dynamic undeniably gives Apple products a leg up on every other rival.

5) People don’t always buy in an economically rational way. If you’ve got a 4S with an unlimited data plan, you’ll be spending on a new device and paying more for data to boot if you buy the iPhone 5–a device that for all its improvements probably won’t change your life, your productivity, or your mobile communications or entertainment very much. Nothing new here either, but I still contend that many of the tens of millions of people who will snap up the iPhone 5 in coming months will fit this profile. And that’s not counting idiots who can’t tell the difference between iPhone models.

6) I’m actually an idiot, so why would anyone take my advice anyway? OK, I don’t believe that, but clearly a lot of commenters on my previous post do, so I feel obligated to mention the possibility that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Besides, I wanted to provide one answer that would satisfy all those rabid Apple fanboys.

We’re just hours away from what will certainly be one of the most massive hypefests of the year: the introduction of Apple’s newest iPhone. Even without the benefit of Steve Jobs to add that extra touch of magicreality distortion to the proceedings in San Francisco, the entire tech world will see a plunge in productivity for several hours starting at 10 a.m. Pacific while they watch and chew over the launch of what is all but now confirmed to be called the iPhone 5.

No doubt Apple will sell a ton of the new iPhones. Indeed, though I find this hard to believe, iPhone sales could even add a big boost to this year’s Gross Domestic Product. Diehard Apple fans, and there are millions upon millions of them, won’t be able to resist lining up at Apple stores the night before they become available to be among the first to buy the latest and greatest iPhone.

But you shouldn’t be one of them. Here’s why I think most of you–not all, but most–would be better off not buying the new iPhone:

* It probably won’t be revolutionary. I know–blasphemy! The many leaks of what the new one will look like and the way it will work indicate the new iPhone will, of course, be thinner and faster and sport a bigger screen. So what else is new?

And think about the last time. The iPhone 4S had Siri, the voice assistant that was supposed to revolutionize the way we interact with devices and, oh, by the way, kill Google search. It did neither (though ask me again in a few years, as Siri no doubt steadily improves).

Anyway, let’s face it, smartphones in their current incarnation may not get much better fundamentally. As Steve Shankland at CNET recently pointed out, we’re in an era of incremental refinement more than revolutionary change. At some point, Apple may well come up with yet another product that actually resets the standard for computing and communication devices. But by all reports, the new iPhone isn’t that product. Simply put, you don’t need to own this phone.

* There’s always a risk that something won’t work quite right on the new model, leaving you with buyer’s remorse. Apple’s better than most at avoiding this sort of thing. But remember that faulty antenna in the iPhone 4 two years ago? Update: One word: Maps.

* The older iPhones are still great. Even though some reviewers criticized Apple for touting a machine that didn’t provide many advances, such as a larger screen, the iPhone 4S last year still was widely seen as the best iPhone yet, and still the best overall on the market.

* You will get several of the benefits of the new iPhone just by installing iOS 6–for free. No big screen, no fast LTE data, of course–two biggies, to be sure. But you won’t be left with lagging services like you do with many Android phones that can’t upgrade to the latest OS.

* The older iPhones are also cheap–or free! For one thing, used iPhones are flooding the market as people get ready to buy the new one. Last month, Sprint Nextel and even Apple itself discounted the iPhone 4S, and it doesn’t stretch the imagination to think that when the new model appears, prices for older iPhones will fall across the board. When the iPhone 4S came out, the iPhone 4’s price fell to just $100 and the 3G model was (and still is) free with at AT&T contract. If the pattern holds, doesn’t a free iPhone 4 sound pretty sweet?

* If you go with an older model, you can also save bigtime on service plan costs. If you go with a prepaid carrier such as Virgin Mobile or Cricket, you have to pay more for the phone, but over a couple of years, their lower-cost data plans save hundreds of dollars. It’s not clear whether similar deals will be offered with the new iPhone, but it appears unlikely at the outset–so your only way to get those savings is to go with an older model.

* You may have fewer unlimited-data plan options with the new iPhone. Verizon and AT&T have ended their unlimited-data plans, so that’s not new. But on existing phones and contracts, they’re grandfathered in, a significant reason to think twice about an iPhone purchase that would require you to switch carriers. Sprint may offer an unlimited-data plan, but that means switching carriers if you’re not already on it.* There are–yes–other smartphones out there.Android phones such as Samsung’s Galaxy S III, and even some Windows 8 phones such as Nokia’s Lumia 920, get rave reviews. …

Apple just reported an extremely rare miss on its third-quarter earnings. The company came in below analysts’ expectations on profits, and Apple’s fourth-quarter outlook underwhelmed analysts as well, thanks in large part to “transition” issues this fall.

Translation: People are waiting for the iPhone 5 to come out and, as a result, they aren’t buying as many of the current models as expected.

The stock has fallen more than 5% after-hours. I feel really bad. Because I’m one of those waiters. …

Google is just a couple of days away from debuting a new tablet that could finally shake up a market utterly dominated so far by Apple’s iPad.

Reports from Gizmodo and others say Google is likely to introduce the diminutive 7-inch tablet at its Google I/O developers conference (whose Wednesday keynote I will be covering live here). The kicker, according to the reports: The tablet, built by Asus, will start at $199 for an 8 GB of memory, up to $249 for a 16 GB version.

Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire already plowed this pricing ground, of course, so such a tablet wouldn’t be entirely new. But while the Fire has been reasonably successful for Amazon, it hasn’t made much of an apparent dent in the iPad because of its limitations, including a somewhat app platform controlled by Amazon itself. And the Fire doesn’t run a standard version of Android, making it tougher yet for developers to do apps for it.

Let’s not forget Microsoft’s coming Surface tablet, either. But the reported pricing on that device, introduced last week, sounds quite close to the iPad’s. So unless it’s significantly better, which seems doubtful, it seems unlikely to mount a serious challenge.

But Google’s tablet, assuming as Chairman Eric Schmidt has promised (and this is a very big assumption) that it performs well, could for the first time challenge the iPad. And it would come at a time when tablets are the focus of everyone in tech from chipmakers and hardware manufacturers to app developers to marketers and publishers hoping to capitalize on a new mobile Internet device that could give them the creative canvas to rival (or exceed) the appeal of television and magazines. Here’s why Google might have a hit this time:

* It’s cheap. Now, merely being cheap won’t guarantee people will buy it in sufficient numbers to matter. But at $199, it doesn’t have to be every bit as good as the iPad. As Clayton Christensen has noted in cases dating all the way back to the transistor radio in the 1950s, a rival can most successfully challenge an established incumbent not by matching it feature-by-feature, but by offering something good enough for most people for a lot less money.

* The rock-bottom price will attract more app developers. If it’s decent enough to sell a lot thanks to the low price, that suddenly makes Android a more attractive platform for app developers. One of several reasons the iPad is the most popular app platform is that Apple controls the operating system version so developers don’t need to rewrite an app for each device running different versions. …

Amid widespread concerns that mobile advertising may never work as well as ads served to people’s desktop and laptop computers, several companies are attempting to prove the naysayers wrong. Facebook partners piled on earlier this week with studies showing the social network’s mobile ads produce way more clicks and revenues than its desktop ads.

Now it’s Google’s turn. This morning it’s trotting out, along with updated mobile search ads, a case study of how T-Mobile last year used Google mobile search ads to try to get more new customer activations to its cellular service. Kari Nicholas, T-Mobile’s director of media, said in an interview that the company aimed to do that by making it easier to sign up online or reach them via their existing mobile phone to visit nearby stores.

The main goal, given that most people doing a search on T-Mobile or other more general wireless-related words such as smartphones or 4G are likely to be well down the path to getting a new phone or service, was to guide those searchers quickly and easily to the nearest store. So the campaign served separate ads to mobile users, automatically showing both the nearest store on a map and a click-to-call button. The company also served different ads depending on whether the person had an Android or an iPhone or was on a particular service such as Verizon or T-Mobile.

The results: In one month, the campaign attracted 162,000 people to T-Mobile’s website. The mobile search ads tied to a person’s location got a lot of clicks–a 13% click-through rate, which is orders of magnitude higher than standard display ads. And the ads also generated 20,000 phone calls to stores. …

Still struggling to figure out how to participate in Facebook and the rest of the social Web, marketers now face a brand-new set of challenges and opportunities to their established way of doing business: mobile advertising. As more people abandon their personal computers to do everything on their iPhones and iPads, advertisers need to figure out how they can continue to reach them on a tiny screen, often in the social context of Facebook and other social networks people use on their mobile devices.

A group of mobile and advertising startups took a crack today at educating the marketers and agencies they want to sell to during a panel at AlwaysOn’s OnMobile conference in Redwood City, Calif. On the panel are host Bill Cleary, founder of Cleary & Partners; Ragnar Kruse, CEO of Smaato, which represents 50,000 mobile publishers on ad networks; Lucy Jacobs, COO of Facebook ad firm Spruce Media; Are Traasdahl, founder and CEO of Tapad, which offers cross-platform ads; and Lon Otremba, CEO of mobile social gaming platform Tylted. Here’s what they had to tell Madison Avenue folks about how they can tap into the emerging mobile opportunities:

Q: How do you deal with the cynicism of Madison Avenue about Facebook and mobile?

Otremba: It’s the same scenario we saw when the Web came around. There’s as much fear as anything. They know their clients are going to beat the hell out of them if they don’t figure it out soon.